Sign In

Advertisement

Two Poems

Pamela Miller

Issue 73, Spring-Summer 1978

The Speedreader

His method is published in a pamphlet.Turning pages so quickly he resemblessome complicated threshing machine,in dark Gray suit and a sickly tie,his bald head gleaminglike an ice rink,he has read forty books in three hours,including a dozen popular novelsand a difficult treatise on the bone structure of birdssome eight hundred pages in length.His football-shaped glassescontinuallyslip down his nose: he either squints above themor prods them back up with a fingertip.The finished books are stacked on the floorlike a tower of abandoned apartments.His method is published in this pamphlet:he sees each wordas a desert island, equippedwith one tall palmand two shipwrecked men in tattered clothes,and as the menshake hands, he reads the sentence in the spacebetween their fingers. Eventually, the menwill starve to death, and hewill be seen in parks, pathetic,turning the cheesy pages of a movie magazineas slowly as the descent of a glacier.